Honestly, I was disappointing when I first opened the book (or really, double clicked the file) and did not see an aboleth. I thumbed through a few more pages and saw things like Jelly Death and Pukis. I then realized that this is not another book of monsters we already know and love. This is a collection of mostly new monsters. And these new monsters were spawning ideas in my head.

The compendium also introduces a pretty cool feature – dual stats for every monster. Each beastie gets details for 0e/1e and BX generation games. Most have a picture (I guess you should know what a bat looks like, but who knew a Psi-bat looked like that?!?) Let me say dual stats is a greater concept than sliced bread – however, I wish the 0e/1e stats followed the S&W convention of displaying ascending and descending armor class values… Finally there is an exhaustive list of edition-based treasure types and XP values for everything – you know how New Big Dragon loves charts!

Anyway, this is a very awesome book – totally worth 6 bucks but right now its on sale for $2…hundreds of monsters for less than a cup of coffee…